Alpinism & Ski guiding company has been taking clients into the mountains since the Millennium year, providing safe and adventurous guided mountain experiences.

The company was established in 1999,
by Gary Dickson and his wife Iris Abächerli

Gary (or Gaz) has been in the mountain guiding industry in New Zealand since 1987, honing his skills first as a glacier guide in Fox Glacier on the West Coast through to four years as chief guide at Alpine Guides in Mt Cook before being his own boss with the creation of Alpinism & Ski Wanaka. Gary works as a senior assessor and trainer of mountain guides for the New Zealand Mountain Guides Association as well as avalanche educator and ski mountaineering instructor for Australia's elite defense personnel.

Originally from Switzerland, Iris has extensive experience in the tourism industry and with a commercial and administrative background runs the Alpinism & Ski base operations. Her mountaineering experience enables her to offer sound and practical advice and in between she runs the Alpinism & Ski soft recreational trekking excursions.

Alpinism & Ski operations started in September 2000 with a ski touring trip in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Extending the alpinism activities to the Northern Hemisphere with guided ascents and mountaineering instruction courses in the Swiss, French and Italian Alps during June, July and August each year was a natural thing to do with the obvious Swiss connection. Training and assessing Icelandic glacier and mountain guides has now also been added to the global portfolio.

During the first ten years, the team has built a small, high quality global enterprise providing a professional mountain guiding and instructional service to keen climbers, aspiring mountaineers and future mountain guides, ski tourers and hikers.

The new 2010 brochure (big down load) at a glance: click

Currently climbing and mountaineering in the Swiss Alps.

Ski touring in New Zealand September/October 2010:

or e-mail us with your preferred dates.

Alpinism & Ski and it's environmental direction:

Given the nature of the business it is very obvious that sustainability and environment friendly ways of operating are a must and keenly pursued and the team is proud of what they achieved so far with projects of improvement still and always on-going at the Alpinism & Ski base in Wanaka as well as in the mountains.

We are looking forward to share our paradise with you.